Another Book...

It's easy to stay on top of books when you're recovering from a broken leg and have no go-to-and-work kind of a.job. And no kids.

So...I finished The Broom of the System, and it was a pretty cool first novel from a writer who died too early for some of us Post Modern literature fans.

I was looking through my library, Norm, for something else to read, and decided before getting into The Wind Up Bird Chronicles that I would work through a book that I started before, but eventually abandoned. This book I picked up for free one day coming home to Bed-Stuy. It was on a sheet labeled "Free Books".

This would be the first thing I've ever read by Faulkner, and when I finish it, I'll be adding it as an entry in my Library Blog. Maybe that should be if I finish it.

I know Faulkner is a master, or one of the American's from between the Wars who's literarily important. I know he worked in Hollywood for years to get bills paid. As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are the masterworks, I hear.

Allen Tate wrote an introduction to this edition, and he writes with much reverence that he places Sanctuary with those other two as a third masterwork. The first line written on the back-cover of this copy is a quote from William Faulkner himself, describing the genesis of the story: "The most horrific tale I could imagine".

This book is hard to get into. Nothing happens for the first forty pages. It's moody and atmospheric and kinda scary, but really, nothing happens. A guy is drinking from a spring in the backwoods of Mississippi and seems to be menaced by the spring's owner, the supposed main antagonist named Popeye. Then the spring-drinking guy gets led back to some old pre-Civil War house full of weirdos and whores, and a sleeping baby in a box. Yeah, a sleeping baby in a box; the box affords protection from rats, according to the mom who put him inside.

Then the spring-drinking guy is led to a truck, where he gets a ride to his sister's house, and he meets a guy who might be interested in his sister (who's a widower with a child), except he's got a date with a girl who'll be raped by Popeye, which is the main event of the book. Except that hasn't happened yet. Nothing's happened yet.

When Horace Benbow finally meets Gowan, and Gowan leaves to pick up Temple is where I am, and it's maybe forty pages in, and they're forty of some of the weirdest and slowest pages I've read.

I remember putting it down the first time through; when you're focusing on Pynchon and Denis Johnson and Politkovskaya and Bolanyo, Faulkner is like their stylistic grandfather, but this little book is unassumingly dense and less exciting to read than I'd hoped.

Now I'm slogging again, maybe to try and tackle Ulysses next.